The Blind Side of Marketing Part 2 of 3

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In part 1 we covered the correlation between football and small business regarding the use of planning and strategy to protect their most valuable investment from the blind side.

As a quick refresher the blind side in football or in business is the point you are the most vulnerable. For small business owners this point is most often in the area of marketing. You can protect your marketing blind side by engaging the biggest, strongest, and fastest marketing actions in your small business.

Like in football, marketing can only work well when there is a game plan. This plan starts with senior management assigning each marketing action a responsibility just like a head football coach assigns assistant coaches responsibility for a portion of each game. These assignments are then passed on to the team members responsible for executing the assignments. This would be the players in football and marketing personnel in business.

If you’re a small business owner you need a marketing plan. Without one how will you muster an offense that is going to consistently produce revenue gains? Let’s take a look at creating a marketing plan that can help you acquire new customers.

Small business owners should regularly review their marketing plan. If you don’t have a plan then you should make it a priority to create one. The marketing plan doesn’t need to be extensive but it should help you answer the following questions:

Where are you now? This will establish a benchmark to measure new results.

What have you been doing to market your business?

How much new revenue comes from existing marketing activities?

What is your current customer acquisition cost?

Where do you want to go with new marketing?

Establish a realistic revenue goal for new marketing actions

Assign new marketing actions to existing or new marketing channels

Set marketing goals to measure actions, weekly, monthly, or quarterly

How will you get where you want to go? Ask yourself some questions:

How did my largest competitor capture market share in their early days?

What are my competitors doing that I am not currently doing?

What can I do to make measurable changes to capture more customers?

A marketing plan will help you assess how best to budget marketing actions before you start spending time or money, and it can serve as a plan you can share with your team.

Your marketing plan is the way to change the game and places you in a position to gain new customers and increase revenues. Without a marketing plan a small business is left to the vulgarities of fate. You can control the fate of your business by using an easily created and easily implemented marketing plan.

In part 3 we will cover five marketing elements to help you implement your marketing plan, acquire new customers, and grow your business.